MAXON
congratulates the many customers that won and were nominated by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Visual Effects Society
(VES) and other prominent creative arts organizations for outstanding
achievement in the visual effects and other categories who leveraged the
company’s professional 3D solutions – CINEMA
4D and Body
Paint 3D – to create this year’s most proclaimed characters,
backgrounds and environments.

Life of Pi, this year’s, Oscar® award-winning film for Best
Visual Effects was created by MAXON customers to create the stereoscopic
shots of the tea tree fields, hills, towns and church featured in the
Ang Lee directed film. MAXON’s state-of-the-art 3D software solutions
were also featured in two of the Best Visual Effects Oscar nominees – Prometheus
and Marvel’s The Avengers. In addition, many of the film and
videogame projects honored by the VES also relied on MAXON products,
including Men in Black™ 3, The Amazing Spider-Man and
Halo 4.

MAXON technology played key roles in the complex onscreen and gadget
display screen graphics seen throughout Marvel’s The Avengers and
Men in Black 3, as well as the CG environments, creatures, costumes
and spaceship designs that contributed to Prometheus’ futuristic
tone. [Editors‘ Note: For a complete listing of Academy Award
nominations, please visit: http://oscar.go.com/nominees.For a complete listing of VES Awards winners, please visit: http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/11th-Annual-VES-Awards-Winners]

“Each year, celebrated visual effects, motion graphics and animation
artists choose MAXON 3D solutions to help bring their creative visions
to life,” Paul Babb, president/CEO MAXON said. “We congratulate all our
customers, those who were nominated and won awards this season, who
continue to set the industry standard in 3D artistry and inspire and
entertain audiences around the world.”

Life of Pi – Oscar Winner for Best Visual
Effects

Life of Pi, the magical film adventure about a 16-year-old Indian
son of a zookeeper and his shipwreck with a tiger won numerous awards
from prestigious organizations around the world including four
Oscar wins for 'Best Visual Effects,' 'Best Direction,' 'Best Original
Score,' and 'Best Cinematography.' The film also received multiple VES
Awards including the 'Visionary Award' for Lee; 'Outstanding Visual
Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture'; and
'Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Feature Motion Picture.'

Acclaimed digital artist and long-time CINEMA 4D user, Steven
Messing (Prometheus, Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, Transformers:
Dark of the Moon, Water for Elephants, and the upcoming film titles,
Star Trek Into Darkness and Pirates of the Caribbean 5)
served as visual effects art director on Life of Pi,working
under Paul Graff, visual effects supervisor at Crazy
Horse Effects, Venice, Calif. Messing used CINEMA 4D mostly for the
wide establishing stereoscopic shot of central character ‘Pi’ Patel’s
rural hometown in Munnar, India and outer lying areas that required the
creation of very specific landmarks including a temple, mosque and
church that still exist in some form today.

Messing explained that he art directed the landscape and buildings to be
a bit more surreal in scale and scope.

“I created a wide overscan matte painting that was projected in layers
onto 3D geometry in CINEMA 4D,” Messing said. “CG FX Supervisor, Luke
Mcdonald and Compositing Supervisor, Josh Lacross were able to breathe
life into the shot using CINEMA 4D's powerful tool set. We rendered
fully lit and dynamic 3D tree elements, animated birds, people and
animals, and moving clouds with interactive light rays casting shadows
across the landscape. With CINEMA 4D we had a very efficient
stereoscopic pipeline that allowed us to render amazing results in a
practical time frame."

Prometheus – Oscar Nominee for Best Visual
Effects

Digital artist Steven Messingutilized CINEMA
4D to conceptualize and design complex visual effects shots in the
production of Twentieth Century FOX’s Prometheus,
directed by Ridley Scott.

Messing served as Visual Effects Art Director, working under Prometheus
Production Designer Arthur Max. He leveraged CINEMA 4D’s speed, agility
and intuitive processes to produce several physical set builds, as well
as CG environments, creatures, costumes and spaceship designs that
contributed to the aesthetic and mythological visual tone of the film.
He also worked through post-production creating matte shots and
additional designs, working under VFX Supervisor, Richard Stammers and
VFX Producer, Allen Maris.

Cantina
Creative, a design and visual effects studio located in Culver City,
Calif., was called on to realize numerous 2D and 3D elements that appear
throughout the blockbuster superhero film, Marvel’s
The Avengers. Stephen Lawes, Cantina co-founder and creative
director, Sean Cushing, Cantina co-founder and VFX producer, and Venti
Hristova, Cantina VFX supervisor, assembled a talented in-house VFX team
that included Jayse
Hansen, a film and television screen and UI designer/animator (2012,
Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Avengers), and Navarro
Parker, an Emmy-winning motion graphics, 3D animation and visual
effects artist (Iron Man, The Transformers and The Avengers) –
both acclaimed CINEMA 4D artists – for the job.

Director Joss Whedon wanted new visual concepts for the Heads-Up-Display
(HUD) in the new Iron Man Mark VII suit and challenged the Cantina team
to design and animate a massive amount of computer screen displays for
both Tony Stark and S.H.I.E.L.D. – the fictional espionage and law
enforcement agency in the film that deals with superhuman threats.Most
of thesescreen displays were featured on the 'Helicarrier,'
the aircraft carrier that travels on water and in the air.

“CINEMA 4D played a vital role in designing 3D elements during various
phases of the design process, from early draft screenshots to final
delivery,” said Hansen. “We used the software to provide 3D volumetric
representations of the Iron Man suit, and also for designing several HUD
widgets in the new modes for Diagnostic, Battle and Flight.

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

“For the various scenes, in particular the ones where a missile
threatens Stark Tower and all of New York City, CINEMA 4D’s tight
integration with Adobe After Effects and the City Kit plug-in from Greyscalegorilla
was the creative advantage that let us quickly deliver changes and pull
off the final stereo shots,” Hansen said.

Parker explained that CINEMA 4D was also instrumental in visualizing a
multi-dimensional city-map HUD widget that allowed Tony Stark to track
his location, the location of the other Avengers, and incoming
threats: “CINEMA 4D's Cel Renderer helped the team create extremely fast
and exceptionally clean razor-thin wireframe renders.”

Visual effects artists at New York-based Perception
teamed with Columbia Pictures Men in Black 3 Director Barry
Sonnenfeld, Production Designer Bo Welch, and VFX Supervisor Ken
Ralston, to create various interface effects and design elements seen
throughout the film. Utilizing an early iteration of CINEMA 4D's stereo
camera rig, the Perception team created stereo interface animations with
the MIB headquarters, as well as the plot-pivotal time-jump device.

“CINEMA 4D became a crucial part of our workflow on Men In Black
3, allowing us to add layers of dimensionality to otherwise flat
imagery, making the MIB technology and gadgets far more advanced than we
have seen in past films,” said John Lepore, creative director,
Perception.

Sony Pictures Imageworks

Multiple Oscar-winning visual effects and animation studio Sony
Pictures Imageworks (SPI) is nominated again this year by the Visual
Effects Society for its feature film contributions on Men in Black 3,
The Amazing Spider-Man and Hotel Transylvania. For Men
in Black 3, visual effects legends, Ken Ralston and Jay
Redd, lead a team in creating extensive, stylized and otherworldly
visual effects sequences. MAXON's BodyPaint 3D was used to texture paint
numerous assets in the film including several of the main characters,
Jay, Kay and Boris, the monocycle, Shea Stadium, Lunar Prison, Saturn V
rocket, Chinatown, Bogladite (alien ships), pterodactyls, satellite and
others.

“The most challenging aspect of working on Men in Black 3 was
the sheer number and numerous layers of assets that required painting,”
commented Tom Quach, senior texture painter, Sony Pictures Imageworks.
“But luckily for me, I was very familiar with BodyPaint and its tight
integration with Adobe Photoshop allowed me to work very efficiently
without affecting quality. I managed to paint all assigned assets on
time and contributed in keeping our texture department under budget. I
wouldn't have been able to work so quickly without the BodyPaint 3D
toolset.”

The recently released hit video game, Halo 4, one of the most
successful franchises in game history, was nominated for a VES award for
'Outstanding Real-Time Visuals in a Video Game.' The
Sequence Group, the Vancouver, BC-based creative studio, in
partnership with the Halo franchise team at 343
Industries, Redmond, Washington, relied on CINEMA 4D to build,
texture, animate and render scenes that produced over twenty minutes of
original animated content in the game, including eight “Terminal”
animations – hidden content within the game that players can access
providing detailed backstory about the characters and the new Halo world.

Ian Kirby, Sequence Group director, outlined that CINEMA 4D proved
essential to scenes requiring dynamic camera moves, lip animation,
particles and dynamics such as cloth. “Relying on CINEMA 4D allowed us
to work quite easily with animation and compositing artists of various
skill sets, while being able to easily export and import our scene
information for a more seamless workflow," said Kirby. "Creating
our main characters in CINEMA 4D was an advantage as we could reuse them
for an entire scene without having an artist paint a new character for
every scene, while the seamless integration of the CINEMA 4D Mograph
toolset with Adobe After Effects allowed us to achieve a painterly look
for all the 3D renders and create complex and dynamic animations without
having to spend countless hours coding."

About MAXON Computer

MAXON Computer is a developer of professional 3D modeling, painting,
animation and rendering solutions. Its award-winning CINEMA 4D and
BodyPaint 3D software products have been used extensively in the film,
television, science, architecture, engineering and other industries.
MAXON has offices in Germany, USA, United Kingdom, France and Japan.
MAXON products are available directly from the Website and its worldwide
distribution channel. Specially priced learning editions of the
company’s software solutions are also made available to educational
institutions. For additional information on MAXON visit www.maxon.net.

All trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective
owners.

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